What a week it’s been for the Classic Community and we’ve got a lot to break down including the bombshell news that we’ll be getting a playable World Of Warcraft: Classic demo at Blizzcon and at home for virtual ticket holders.

On top of that we also got wind of another purported Classic ‘leak’. While we don’t seek to give too much credence to what it says given its source, it’s still a little fun to analyse and speculate with so Josh puts some of the points to two former vanilla WoW developers, Bo Bell & Kevin Jordan, for their thoughts on what was said as Josh plays excerpt previews from those upcoming long form interviews.

After that, it’s time for a bunch of listener calls covering windfury, normalisation, hunters, warriors, dueling and WoW art. Then we hit up Anger Management, Memory Lane and some show clean up.

With respect, I think your argument about the Blizzcon ticket pricing is very ignorant to what it means to package and sell something.

The “extras” in the Blizzcon ticket aren’t actually extras. They’re designed to sell the entire ticket to groups of the player base they know are completely uninterested in the Blizzcon streams. Mounts are not some neat extra they’re giving to Blizzcon buyers just because they’re nice guys. They’ve done their market research like any respectable company, and know full well that they can sell Blizzcon tickets to a new audience on the basis of an exclusive mount alone.

Your sports analogy is inapt. You incorrectly (I assume accidentally) equate a free hot dog as though it’s comparable to what’s on offer with the Blizzcon ticket but that’s just flatly ridiculous. Nobody buys sports tickets just for the hot dog. Lots and lots of Blizzcon buyers do so just for the in game content. Blizzard aren’t idiots. They know this. That’s why they bother to offer the in-game content in the first place.

You’re really off base for ridiculing people for having the intelligence to realize they’re being marketed to in an attempt to convince them to buy into a lot of other products they obviously don’t want to buy.

All this said, I have no problem ethically with Blizzard marketing things this way. If people will happily throw money at them for 1 item while paying for 10 more items they don’t want, more power to them. My only personal issue is the price point. $50 is way, way, way too much for the value on offer for what I’m interested in. I’ve grown increasingly pessimistic about the design philosophy currently employed by Blizzard in most of their games. I have no interest in paying them money for them to tell me about the terrible design choices they’re planning on implementing in some of my favorite games. The only reason I would want to buy it is the Classic demo, so I really need to evaluate it on only those terms. It isn’t enough. Guaranteed Beta invite? Then I might bite.